Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. An American novelist, short story writer, reporter, and poet, Hemingway is considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.

At the age of seventeen, Hemingway worked as a newspaper reporter in Kansas City before joining a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian Army during World War I. During his service, he was wounded while serving at the front, earning decoration by the Italian government. After the war, Hemingway became a foreign correspondent for American and Canadian newspapers, notably the Toronto Star. He settled in Paris in the 1920s, joining fellow American expatriate writers Djuna Barnes, Kay Boyle, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein. While there, he wrote the novels The Sun Also Rises (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926); A Farewell to Arms (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929); and For Whom the Bell Tolls (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940).

In the 1940s, Hemingway lived in Cuba and then in Spain during the Second World War. After the war, he wrote The Old Man and the Sea (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), winner of the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature. He then penned a memoir about his years in Paris, titled A Moveable Feast (Scribner’s, 1964).

While he is best known for his fiction, Hemingway published 88 Poems (Harcourt, 1979), which spanned over thirty years of writing.

Ernest Hemingway died in Ketchum, Idaho, on July 2, 1961.